Microsoft still is not officially the owner of Skype, given the acquisition has yet to receive European antitrust approval. But that isn't stopping Skype from rolling out new products and updates in the interim.

Microsoft officials said relatively little about Skype during last week's Build conference, which was for developers interested in writing apps and building hardware for Windows 8. However, Istartedsomething.com noted that Microsoft may be counting on making Skype integration a key piece of Windows 8, citing a screen shot showing a Metro tile featuring missed phone calls.

"Lync's a fantastic product for communicating with folks who are inside your enterprise, in your directory, inside your security boundary. You can set Lync up nicely so that it also connects with the PS(T)N phone system, and you can make outbound calls and the like.

"But certainly as we got into the scenarios, one of the scenarios that is most interesting to think about completing is actually being able to go consumer-to-consumer, consumer-to-business, business-to-business, and give the enterprise appropriate kind of control and security and auditing, at the same time letting people open up to all of their friends, their families, their professional contacts, their suppliers, their vendors, et cetera.

"So, in some senses you could say there were a lot of drivers behind the Skype acquisition, but certainly real-time conferencing, voice and video is not a new area to us, but the opportunity to have a really broader market impact to drive the future in these scenarios much harder."

Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 30 years for a variety of publications, including ZDNet, eWeek and Baseline. She is the author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era (John Wiley & Sons, 2008). She also is the cohost of the "Windows Weekly" podcast on the TWiT network.
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Disclosure

Freelance journalist/blogger Mary Jo Foley has nothing to disclose. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). I do not own Microsoft stock or stock in any of its partners or competitors. I have no business ventures that are sponsored by Microsoft or any of its partners or competitors.